


Sick Child

by HouseofLegion (GoldenBloodyTears)



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: 1990s, Character Study, Depression, F/M, Feel the drudgery of small town Canada, First Love, First Time, Highschool social hierarchy, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, POV Third Person Limited, References to Depression, Underage Smoking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 13:43:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20743151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenBloodyTears/pseuds/HouseofLegion
Summary: Highschool sucks; especially when stuck in a dead-end town. Julie wants out as quick as possible. She’s not the only one.Or, a character study of Julie leading up to the formation of the Legion as a group. Will be multi-chapter because I have lots to write.





	1. On Ormond

Julie wants out of Ormond. The quicker, the better.

Ormond is small; a tiny box of a town where you can see every corner no matter where you’re standing. Every year runs like a broken record, skipping and repeating since the day she was born. Winter tastes like tourism and nostalgia for lost dreams. Traffic flows with the surge of travellers heading to the popular ski slopes towns over. Every election year has the prospectives talking about how they’d revitalize Ormond’s economy—god fucking help you if you don’t suggest trying to reopen the ski lodges, and god fucking help you even more if the coal mines get mentioned. Every summer is the same, quick and cold with a brief bloom of hot right around Canada Day. Neighbours get drunk, nearly blow themselves up with fireworks and her parents always end up fighting after getting two disgusting swigs of vodka and orange into their systems. She hides away in her room, dresser blocking the door, and blasts the radio until she can’t hear anything—can’t fucking feel anything but the thrum of the bass and her father’s fists against her door as he drunkenly screams to turn the “FUCKING NOISE OFF!”

At some point, Julie starts stocking up on her mother’s sleeping pills. She takes a pill from the bottle every few weeks, stashes it away in a plastic baggy in the hole in her mattress for safe keeping. Her mother never notices that her prescription runs short each month, and for that she’s thankful. No need for them to fake worry about her, or _ god forbid _pity her.

Julie wants out of Ormond—even if it’s in a casket.

Her parents don’t know. They don’t know a fucking thing about her. Julie has become good at perfecting her performance while at school—good grades, treasurer for the student council, an attractive cheerleader that nobody really respects but still envies anyways. Her parents know her for her achievements, and that’s it. They don’t know that she’s only popular because of the parties they let her host when they go out of town—

Why should they care anyways? She’s their perfect angel, there’s no reason to be concerned for her.

It’s all bullshit anyways.

She’s bored of Ormond.

She’s bored to death.


	2. Frank Morrison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Julie has a crush.

Frank Morrisson.

Even while running in parallel circles, he’s an outlier to Fairview’s melting pot of teens—those who if they don’t know one another, they likely know of one another through their families. New to town, the newest foster to end up on Clive Andrew’s doorstep—new means trouble. But he showed up at her 10th grade Halloween party, a trickster with a grin and stories of life outside Ormond. He’s older than her by a year, and was older than everyone else at that party too.

A glance in the hallway, basketball and cheer practice in the same shitty gym—_ Julie’s got a crush!— _listening to her squad captain laugh. They don’t talk much; can’t talk much. There’s never the opportunity outside of her parties. The others don’t see what she sees in him—the way he can captivate a small crowd, how he talks about life outside of Ormond until you start to feel wistful, almost like it’s your own life you’re missing—

_ And _ he’s handsome in a rough way, the kind of guy her grandmother would hate. She finds herself buzzing with interest at the thought of him, at the thought of _ them _, together in a beat up car as they drive away into the sunset, Ormond fading into the distance. 

He disappears from Fairview not long after getting kicked from the basketball team for shoving the ref—_ definitely trouble _—but he still shows up at her parties; and for that small mercy Julie is also thankful. 

“I would have done it too,” she says once, while they’re standing outside on her back deck during another one of her parties. The spring night air is crisp and reeks of Frank’s cigarette as he turns to look at her. 

His stare is intense, like she’s said something funny. Like she’s said something he didn’t expect and doesn’t know how to respond as he presses his cigarette back to his lips. Maybe he’s just wondering why she’s outside talking to him when she doesn’t smoke. The backyard is near silent, a quiet warbling through the glass of her backdoor from the music playing inside. Maybe she should just go back inside—

“Would have done what?” He finally asks, drawing the words out as smoke billows from his mouth. 

“The ref,” she shrugs. “He was totally being paid off. You just put him in his place—I probably wouldn’t have pushed him though.” 

She watches as Frank’s mouth twists into a lazy grin. 

“And what would _ you _ have done?”

The question hangs between them like his cigarette smoke. What would she have done? She hadn’t done anything—she’d just been pissed each time they got called for an offence ignored when made by the other team. 

“I would have made sure he got fired rather than getting myself kicked for pushing him into the stands.” 

She speaks without really thinking—realizing it’s possible she’s just insulted Frank a second later. But he takes another drag on his cigarette, interrupting himself with a choked laugh.

“And that’s why you make honor roll,” he replies dryly. 

She snorts. Frank grins and steps closer. He brings his cigarette back up to his mouth and inhales, a puff of smoke following as he speaks. 

“I’ve got another question for you, Ms. Jules.” 

“Which is?” Julie asks. 

She doesn’t tell him that the only people she lets call her _ Jules _ is friends or family. Instead, she just smiles. 

“Does it ever get tiring… being Ms. Perfect?” 

Frank shakes the ash from the end of his cigarette, looking smug from his point-blank bluntness. An insult for an insult. If she was anybody else…

She plucks the cigarette from Frank in a calculated measure, watching as his expression shifts into open surprise. She grins, pressing it to her mouth and breathing in like she watched him do earlier.

It’s hotter than she realized; an inferno in her lungs that she chokes on as Frank starts to laugh. Her face feels warm as she glances back up at him. 

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Julie doesn’t tell anyone about this _ development _ between her and Frank. Her fellow students might have looked the other way before—a cheerleader and a basketball player? That’s not news at Fairview. But a dropout? Talk about _ social suicide. _ When she goes to class on Monday morning, it’s with the full intent of forgetting Frank’s laugh. By lunch, she’s failing—thinking about how _ good _ it felt to finally admit that she’s tired of being a golden girl. She skips practice after school— _ for the first time ever— _reveling in that brief moment of rebellion until the next day when she gets torn a new one by her squad captain. 

Later, she digs out the phone-book from under the kitchen counter where it hides among the drain cleaner and her mother’s gardening boots, then scans the columns until she finds the number for one Clive Andrews. She writes it down, stuffing the paper into her mattress hole.

When she pulls her hand back out, it’s with the baggy full of sleeping pills. She flushes them.

When she finally calls on her kitchen phone, it’s late at night when her parents are out and Susie is curled up on the living room couch in a pile of blankets that was supposed to be used to make their sleepover fort. 

“I don’t remember giving you my number,” Frank says, his voice staticky through the line. 

“It’s called a phone book.” 

He laughs in response, and Julie finds that she can picture his face in perfect detail on the back of her eyelids.

“So, what can I do for you?”

They both know she’s calling for a reason—even if she’s not entirely sure what that reason is. 

“Does your daddy know you call boys at midnight on a Wednesday, Jules?” Frank continues, as dry as ever, when she doesn’t answer fast enough. 

She wonders if he can feel the strength of her eye-roll through the phone. 

“Actually,” she starts, lowering her voice to not wake Susie in the next room over, “You’d be the first boy I’ve _ ever _ called at midnight—and I have a question for you.” 

The line fills with a muffled static drag as Frank shifts the phone. Julie tries to picture what he might look like on the other end. Is he sitting on the kitchen floor as well, a half-empty chip bowl at his left foot? She twists her fingers through the plastic cord of the phone. Maybe he’s in his living room, propped on the couch like Susie is—though he doesn’t seem the blanket fort type.

“What’s your question?” Frank’s voice comes back over the line. Warm. Interested.

Julie grins.

“Well, _ Frank Morrisson,” _ she says his name the same way he says _ Jules _—like something neither can quite figure out but find special all the same, “Do you ever get tired of being alone?” 

They’re something different after that night—something fragile and tentative that she doesn’t want to name. She feels different. Ormond itself feels different too, a little less boring. A little less small. 

Another summer comes but this one feels different—the nights less cold when she sneaks out after her parents are asleep. The air almost warm in the cab of Frank’s truck as they pull each other closer, a fumbling of knees and hands as his teeth bite her lip. 

Her favourite part comes after—when they lie together in the backseat with her head on his chest, she counts the beat of his heart as it grows steady. She falls asleep like that once, waking to find his hand playing idly with her hair. He doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t prompt him—he drops her off later, the early morning sun already breaking through the heavy grey clouds. It’s seven am, too early for her mother to be awake, and too late for her father to not be at work—and the missing car in the driveway says the coast should be clear. 

Instead, she finds her mother standing in the kitchen. There’s a bag of frozen veggies pressed to her cheek as she nurses a cup of coffee (that most certainly has vodka in it). Julie doesn’t say anything about how it’s likely to leave a bruise, and her mother says nothing either—not even about the bitemarks Frank’s left on her neck.

Later though, when she comes home from Susie’s, there’s a box of condoms on her bed.


End file.
